Visual Studio Community 2013 is awesome

It’s a Windows 8 laptop and thought I would install the Visual Studio Community 2013 edition of Visual Studio. So far it’s awesome and means I can have a fully working copy of Visual studio on home computer (which is good and a bit sad at the same time :-))

Microsoft have been awesome and the Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free to individual developers, download and see what’s there in the link below

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.

For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Q: How does Visual Studio Community 2013 compare to other Visual Studio editions?
A: Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.

Getting the CRM Developer toolkit working

I had avoided the pain of hacking, nudging, shouting and in the end forcing Visual Studio 2013 to work with the CRM developer toolkit. I had read about it and it didn’t sound like fun.

It has taken a few hours of getting it to work and has taken a lot of mucking about (technical term).

I thought I would blog down my experiences to help other CRM developers who have to go through this.

The main instructions are in this great blog post from Simon Jenkinson, it’s fortunate he blogged this because the initial blog Hashtagcrm.com no longer works 😦

Step 4 – Tricky bit

You have to make sure the target directory already exists or it won’t work, this stopped me for a while because the error message doesn’t say much.

Step 7 – Tricky bit

Step 7 – Open the archive file Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.vsix, or extract it to a sensible location

I could get this to work for quite a while. The main problem I had was if I extracted the Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.vsix, this created a folder Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools, I then edited extension.vsixmanifest to change the ) to ] and change InstalledByMsi=”false” but then I couldn’t figure out how to re-zip or get it back to being the vsix.

In the end I found the solution was to edit the files inside the files inside the Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.vsix.

The VSIX file is the unit of deployment for a Visual Studio 2010 Extension. Visual Studio will recognize the VSIX extension and install the contents of the file to the right location.
A VSIX file is a zip file that uses the Open Packaging Convention. You can rename the .VSIX extension to .ZIP and use any zip browser (including the Windows File Explorer) to browse its contents.

So it’s basically a zip file which holds visual studio extensions, this is good because it means you can edit the contents like this and I guess you could re zip them and then rename to VSIX but I found editing inside the vsix easier.

Once you have changed the values you should be able to double click the VSIX and it will install.

The next stage was to copy the folder CRM MSBuild which has the files below in

Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll

Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.12.targets

Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.dll

microsoft.xrm.sdk.workflow.dll

I had to copy this folder to this directory and rename CRM MSBUILD to CRM

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft

so you should have this

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\CRM

In this folder you should have the four files mentioned above.

The last tricky part was changing some reg files, I had some problems with this and it turned out I needed the line

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

at the top of the reg file edits, who knew. The text are in the link below

I did have to install Windows Identity Foundation or rather you enable it in Windows 8, instructions here

It certainly wasn’t straight forward getting this working. I am really grateful for Simon to blogging about it and giving some clear instructions and I hope this blog augments those to help people get over a few tricky humps.

17 thoughts on “Getting the CRM Developer toolkit working with Visual Studio 2013”

Hi,
Thanks for the post. Very helpful.
The thing is that I installed de developer toolkit on a machine with visual studio 2013 community and on another laptop with VS 2015 community and i’m getting the same issue.
All seems to work fine but if i create a CrmPackage and use the option “Add new item” which is supposed to add Dynamics Crm web resources (JavaScript, Css, Xml,…) I always get an empty dialog (No items found).
Can you confirm it please and if you can help with a workaround.

Step2: Open your CRMpackage project and go to “Tools -> Projects and Solutions” and toggle the “User item template location :” to one of the paths specified in step 1.
That’s it, if the last time you used F1 switch it to F2 (and viceversa).

Step3: Now try to add a NEW item to your Crmpackage project, you will be able to add files from the templates installed with the toolkit.

That’s probably because you haven’t created a CRM folder and copied across the 4 files that Hosk mentioned within your MSBuild folder. If you already have files in there delete them and copy across the ones from the extracted folder.

Actually I Install Visual Studio 2012 in my computer & also install CRM Software Development Kit 2013(SDK). While creating plugin in visual studio new window open and ask Connect to CRM Server. Fill up the details and after choose the organization, solution dropdown is not opening. CRM explorer also not show in the view.plz help me